Billy Graham: A humble preacher who stirred the Meadowlands in 1991

Rev. Billy Graham died at the age of 99. He was known for his charisma, but said "I despise all this attention on me...I'm not trying to bring people to myself, but I know that God has sent me out as a warrior."
USA TODAY

The evangelist, who died Wednesday at 99, walked into a politically divided North Jersey for a five-night crusade in the Meadowlands.

Billy Graham speaks at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford on Sept. 3, 1991. “We are living in a world that hurts,” he said. “You walk up and down the streets in New York city or here in New Jersey and you see hurting people everywhere.”(Photo: AP Photo/Dorab Khandalavala))

It’s been 26 years since Billy Graham staged one of his signature "crusades" in North Jersey. But the advice he gave then on how to navigate America’s tumultuous political landscape still resonates today.

Just before taking the stage for five nights of prayers, sermons and singing in September 1991 at the now-shuttered Meadowlands Arena — then named for former Gov. Brendan Byrne — Graham, who died on Wednesday at 99, held a press conference.

The questions ranged from where Graham, then 72, hoped to retire to how many people he expected to come to his crusade from religiously and ethnically diverse North Jersey — not exactly a hotbed of his style of evangelical Christianity.

Ron Hutchcraft, center, a non-denominational Protestant minister from Wayne, greets the Rev. Billy Graham backstage at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford in September 1991. Graham staged a five-night crusade at the arena that drew a total of about 100,000 people.(Photo: The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, courtesy of Ron Hutchcraft)

Then the questions shifted to politics. What did Graham think of the liberal-conservative divisions roiling America at the time?

Ron Hutchcraft, a non-denominational Protestant minister from Wayne who helped organize local pastors for the Meadowlands crusade, watched Graham intently that day, wondering whether the world-famous evangelist would try to dodge any hint of controversy — or whether he might dive right into it.

“Billy started to tell a story,” Hutchcraft recalled Wednesday. “He described how his home in North Carolina had a large backyard where lots of birds came. And he said all those birds have a left wing and a right wing. But they need both wings to fly right.”

The message: Liberals and conservatives need to find common ground to move America forward.

“I still laugh at how Billy did that,” said Hutchcraft, who now runs a non-denominational Christian outreach ministry in northern Arkansas. “Billy would not be detoured.”

The Rev. Billy Graham preaches on the first night of his three-day crusade at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in the Queens borough of New York, Friday, June 24, 2005.(Photo: AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Billy Graham was known to millions — possibly billions — of people because of his televised sermons and rallies like the one he held at Byrne Arena in 1991. But on Wednesday, as admirers reflected on his legacy as a preacher who prayed with every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, a portrait emerged of Graham as deeply humble man who had an innate ability to connect to people from across the political and religious spectrums.

In almost seven decades of ministry, Graham staged 415 crusades in 185 countries. He held what turned out to be his final rally in June 2005 at the former World's Fair site at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

"We hope to come back again someday," Graham told the crowd. "I was asked in an interview if this was our last crusade. I said, 'It probably is — in New York.' But I also said, 'I never say never.' "

Graham's 1991 Meadowlands crusade, which attracted more than 100,000 people, and a rally in New York City’s Central Park a week later that drew 100,000 more were notable because Graham made a point of reaching out beforehand to Jewish and Catholic leaders on both sides of the Hudson River for help.

If there was any disagreement, it was with the New York Giants. Graham had hoped to stage his Meadowlands crusade at the 80,000-seat Giants Stadium. But the Giants, who had won their second Super Bowl championship seven months earlier and were about to kick off another season as the rallies were to take place, asked if Graham could use Byrne Arena, across the parking lot, which could accommodate about 20,000 people each night.

Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, then the leader of more than a million Catholics in North Jersey, was so impressed by Graham that he not only assigned a priest to the crusade's planning committee but urged lay Catholics to attend the rallies at the Byrne Arena.

In Manhattan, Cardinal John O’Connor, hailing Graham as a “dynamic preacher,” also urged Catholics to go to the evangelist’s rally in Central Park and also assigned priests to show up as counselors.

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O’Connor’s approach was far different from the one embraced by one of his predecessors, New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, who warned Catholics in 1957 not to attend a series of rallies that Graham was staging at Madison Square Garden and instructed priests to preach sermons that were critical of evangelism.

Navigating the political divide

But Graham had changed, too.

In 1957, he referred to New York City as a modern-day equivalent of the Bible’s sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In 1991, he told the New York Times that "people have a negative impression of New York that I don't think is quite fair."

On Wednesday, New York's current Catholic leader, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, praised Graham for his longevity. "Whether it was one of his famous Crusades, radio programs, television specials, or meeting and counseling the presidents, Billy Graham seemed to be everywhere, always with the same message: Jesus is your Savior, and wants you to be happy with Him forever," Dolan said in a statement.

When Graham appeared at the Meadowlands, New Jersey was deeply divided over $2.8 billion in new taxes that Gov. James Florio, a Democrat, had pushed for as part of an expansive and controversial strategy to provide millions of dollars in additional aid to underfunded poor, urban school districts that catered mostly to minority students. Adding to the political discord was Florio’s support for a ban on military-style assault rifles — a position that infuriated the National Rifle Association and contributed to Florio’s defeat two years later by Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican.

Graham seemed to sense that he was walking into a state where even the mention of a tax hike or a ban on assault rifles could spark a full-blown argument.

"I try to stay away from these things that are so emotional," Graham told reporters days before his Meadowlands crusade.

When he took the stage inside Byrne Arena, surrounded by chrysanthemums and backed by a 2,000-member choir in white robes, he joked that he had not preached in New Jersey in many years.

“I’ve heard and I’ve read that this is the first time we ever have held a meeting in northern New Jersey,” said Graham, whose sermons from the Meadowlands can still be found on YouTube. "But that is not true. But you’re not old enough to remember when I was last here.”

Visits to Teaneck, Hawthorne and Montclair

That was a bit of an exaggeration. While not exactly a fixture of New Jersey and New York City, Graham nevertheless made a point of dropping in from time to time.

Graham stopped at the Teaneck Armory in 1957 before heading to his rallies at Madison Square Garden. In the 1940s, Graham preached at the Hawthorne Gospel Church. And in 1970, he held a rally at Shea Stadium.

Graham’s sermons were also broadcast for years on WWDJ, a 5,000-watt Christian radio station based on Main Street in Hackensack. And in 2012, when floods from Superstorm Sandy ravaged a trailer park in Moonachie, teams of volunteers who called themselves the “Billy Graham Rapid Response Team” showed up to help residents clean debris from their homes.

“We are living in a world that hurts,” Graham told the Byrne Arena crowd in 1991. “You walk up and down the streets in New York City or here in New Jersey and you see hurting people everywhere.”

The message was typical of Graham, admirers say, in that it blended his personal observations with a call to reach out and help the downtrodden. At the same time, Graham would also include in his sermons references to his travels around the world and meetings with political leaders.

During those Meadowlands rallies, he mentioned a recent trip to Moscow and efforts by his staff to bring food to war-torn Iraq and Kurdistan.

The Rev. Stephen Giordano, then the pastor of the Clinton Avenue Reformed Church in Bergenfield, went to the Meadowlands each of the five nights that Graham preached there in September 1991, marveling at the evangelist’s abilities to turn even a cavernous arena into an intimate church service.

Mike Kelly(Photo: Peter Monsees / The Record)

“He had an innate ability to make you feel like you were the most important person in the room, even if it was a group experience,” said Giordano, now the pastor of All Saints Lutheran Church in Novato, California. “He was able to communicate that genuine sense of concern to an auditorium filled with thousands of people.”

Before hearing him speak at Byrne Arena, Giordano met Graham at a church in Montclair where local clergy were discussing how they would bring people to the rallies. What struck Giordano was how low-key Graham was.

“Compared to the other evangelists, the guy should have had a real ego,” Giordano said. “But he had no ego. He didn’t puff himself up.”

Jeannine Galenkamp of Wyckoff, who helped to organize the women’s ministry for the 1991 Meadowlands crusade, also remembers being struck by how humble Graham seemed.

“He so related to everybody,” said Galenkamp, who was selected to begin the crusade's first evening session by leading the arena in prayer. “He understood heartache. He understood the traps that people fall into by making bad choices.”

Years later, Galenkamp visited Graham’s home, a log cabin in North Carolina, and was struck by how small it was.

“He wasn’t living in any of those big mansions,” she said. “But now in heaven, he’ll get his big mansion.”

Ron Hutchcraft was not surprised that Graham lived so modestly.

“He was a giant, but I don’t think Billy would have thought of himself as a religious figure,” he said. “Billy saw himself as a messenger, much like a UPS guy who delivers the package to the door.”